A Brief History of Earth

I can’t read much deep-time stuff before it puts me to sleep. I read this. Knoll is a Harvard paleontologist who built his career on the Precambrian, the three billion years of microbial life that came before anything you can see with the naked eye, and here he compresses the whole planet into eight chapters and about 250 pages. He begins with the chemistry of a molten world and moves through the making of oceans and continents, the first cells, the flood of oxygen that made large life possible, the sudden arrival of animals, the greening of the land, and the extinctions that emptied the record and started it over.